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Category: sustainability – Page 2

Elon Musk Crazy Answer đŸ”„ #wealthmindset #motivation

‱ Context and Explanation — Elon Musk was once asked a wild question: could Tesla ever build an aquatic car?

He admitted that a submarine car” is technically possible — but the market for such vehicle would be tiny. The idea might excite enthusiasts, but practicality and scale matter more than novelty.

This response captures Musk’s core philosophy: just because something is technically possible doesn’t mean it’s worth building. True innovation isn’t about chasing every wild idea — it’s about focusing on what can scale, solve real problems, and reshape entire industries.

‱ template — elon musk interview.

‱ Hashtags — #wealthmindset #billionaire #successmindset #millionairevibes #motivation #shortsfeed

Laude × CSGE: Bill Joy — 50 Years of Advancements: Computing and Technology 1975–2025 (and beyond)

From the rise of numerical and symbolic computing to the future of AI, this talk traces five decades of breakthroughs and the challenges ahead.

Bill is the author of Berkeley UNIX, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, author of “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” (Wired 2000), ex-cleantech VC at Kleiner Perkins, investor in and unpaid advisor to Nodra. AI.

Talk Details.
50 Years of Advancements: Computing and Technology 1975–2025 (and beyond)

I came to UC Berkeley CS in 1975 as a graduate student expecting to do computer theory— Berkeley CS didn’t have a proper departmental computer, and I was tired of coding, having written a lot of numerical code for early supercomputers.

But it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future. Berkeley soon had a Vax superminicomputer, I installed a port of UNIX and was upgrading the operating system, and the Internet and Microprocessor boom beckoned.

Continue reading “Laude × CSGE: Bill Joy — 50 Years of Advancements: Computing and Technology 1975–2025 (and beyond)” | >

Non-toxic solvent enables near-perfect recycling of mixed-fiber textiles

We are producing more textiles than ever before: worldwide, well over one hundred million tons of textiles are manufactured every year—more than twice as much as in the year 2000. This makes it increasingly important not to simply throw away old textiles, but to recover them in an environmentally friendly way.

That is often not easy—especially when it comes to blended fabrics, such as mixtures of cotton and polyester. At TU Wien, a new method has now been developed to separate and recycle such mixed textiles efficiently—in a remarkably simple way, using menthol and benzoic acid, two nontoxic substances.

The research is published in the journal Waste Management.

Power-Hungry Data Centers Are Warming Homes in the Nordics

When Finnish engineer Ari Kurvi takes a hot shower or turns up the thermostat in his apartment, he’s tapping into waste heat generated by a 75-megawatt data center 5 kilometers away. As its computer servers churn through terabytes of digital information to support video calls, car navigation systems and web searches, an elaborate system of pipes and pumps harvests the cast-off energy and feeds it to homes in the town of Mantsala in southern Finland.

Since it began operation about a decade ago, the data center has provided heat for the town. Last year, it heated the equivalent of 2,500 homes, about two-thirds of Mantsala’s needs, cutting energy costs for residents and helping to blunt the environmental downsides associated with power-hungry computing infrastructure. Some of the world’s biggest tech companies are now embracing heat recovery from data centers in an effort to become more sustainable.

Kurvi is one of the pioneers of this emerging technology: As an engineer and project manager for Hewlett Packard starting in the 1980s, he spent years working with humming stacks of hardware in hot server rooms during the freezing Finnish winters. That made him think that there must be a good way to put that wasted heat to use.

By pairing computer processing facilities with district heating systems, countries like Finland and Sweden are trying to limit their environmental downsides.

The real reason states first emerged thousands of years ago: New research

Globalization, migration, climate change and war—nation states are currently under huge pressure on many fronts. Understanding the forces that initially drove the emergence of states across the world may help explain why.

For a long time after humans evolved, we lived in oral-based, mostly small-scale and egalitarian societies. Things began to change with the dawn of the Holocene, when a suite of climatic, social and technological shifts led to the emergence of the first states about 5,000 years ago.

The earliest known state was in Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq), followed by Egypt, the Indus Valley, China and Meso-America. The long-standing view was that the invention of agriculture was the spur for these large-scale human societies to emerge. But there was a 4,000-year gap between the expansion of agriculture (circa 9,000 years ago) and the founding of the earliest states, which throws this link into question.

The world’s most efficient solar cell: Chinese researchers explain how they designed and built it

Earlier in 2025, Chinese solar manufacturer Longi announced it had built the world’s most efficient solar cell. The hybrid interdigitated back-contact (HIBC) cell achieved 27.81% efficiency, which was verified by Germany’s Institute for Solar Energy Research Hamelin (ISFH).

Now, in a paper published in the journal Nature, researchers are sharing the technical details of their breakthrough.

For solar technology to deliver on its promise, solar cells and panels must convert as much sunlight as possible into energy. Typically, standard cells achieve up to 26% efficiency, that is, they convert 26% of the sunlight hitting them into electrical energy.

Using peat as sustainable precursor for fuel cell catalyst materials

Iron-nitrogen-carbon catalysts have the potential to replace the more expensive platinum catalysts currently used in fuel cells. This is shown by a study conducted by researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and universities in Tartu and Tallinn, Estonia. The research is published in the journal ACS Nano.

At BESSY II, the team observed the formation of complex microstructures within various samples. They then analyzed which structural parameters were particularly important for fostering the preferred electrochemical reactions. The raw material for such catalysts is well decomposed peat.

Fuel cells convert the chemical energy of hydrogen directly into electrical energy, producing only water. Fuel cells could be an important component in a climate-neutral energy system. The greatest potential for improvement lies in the reduction of costs via the replacement of the electrocatalysts, which are currently based on the precious metal platinum.

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